THE WISDOM OF DOROTHY DAY
Walter G. Moss
Copyright © 2011 by Walter G. Moss
THE WISDOM OF DOROTHY DAY
TABLE OF CONTENTS (with links)
The Long Life of Dorothy Day, 1897-1980
Childhood and Pre-College Years
University of Illinois, 1914-1916
Back in New York, 1916-1920
Chicago, New Orleans, Staten Island, a Daughter, and Conversion, 1921-1927
Tamar, Forester, and the Searching Catholic, 1928-1932
Peter Maurin and the Origin of the Catholic Worker Movement, 1933
Foundations of the CW Movement: The French, the Saints, and the Popes
Foundations of the CW Movement: The Distributists and Russian Writers
From Depression to War
The Cold War Years
Dorothy Day’s Wisdom
Wisdom, Religion, and Catholicism
Wisdom, Love, and Other Values
Personality and Gender
Beauty, Nature, Music, Literature, and Transcendence
Pacifism, Society, and Politics
Conclusion and Legacy
THE WISDOM OF DOROTHY DAY
In his Audacity of Hope (2006) future President Barack Obama wrote, “Surely, secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square; Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr.—indeed the majority of great reformers in American history—not only were motivated by faith but repeatedly used religious language to argue their causes.”[1] In an important speech before religious leaders in June 2006, he again named these five “great reformers”—four men and Dorothy Day—who were motivated by faith.
More surprisingly, five years earlier President George W. Bush had quoted Dorothy Day. The National Catholic Reporter commented as follows:
Now that George W. Bush is quoting pacifist-anarchist-jailbird-agitator-nonvoter-Karl Marx sympathizer Dorothy Day –“Any effective war on poverty must deploy what Dorothy Day called ‘the weapons of spirit,’” the president said at Notre Dame's May 20 commencement—he might want to invite to the White House some followers of the Catholic Worker co-founder.
These troublemakers shouldn't be hard to find. No other religious group has a service ministry closer to the Oval Office.
Members of Washington's Dorothy Day Catholic Worker house of hospitality regularly pull up a van at Lafayette Park facing the White House to distribute sandwiches to the hungry. Instead of a war on poverty, they think there's a war on poor people.[2]
Shortly before President Bush’s remarks, New York’s Cardinal John O’Conner wrote in a column of March 16, 2000 that the Vatican in Rome had approved his request “to open the Cause for the Beatification and Canonization of Dorothy Day”—that is, to consider whether or not to declare her a Catholic saint.[3]
In a 1993 an essay on gender and wisdom, two researchers exploring their subject selected only one person to examine in detail—Dorothy Day, as “an extraordinary 20th-century political reformer and religious figure, whose life demonstrates both her wisdom and the gender-specific struggles that shaped its development.”[4]The relationship of religion to wisdom is complex, and both believers and non-believers can be wise or foolish, but faith can certainly affect wisdom.[5]In the present essay, after surveying Day’s life, we shall look more closely at her developing wisdom and how it was influenced by her being a woman and a Catholic.
The Long Life of Dorothy Day, 1897-1980
Childhood and Pre-College Years
Dorothy Day was born on November 8, 1897 in Brooklyn.[6] Her home was just a few blocks from the famed Brooklyn Bridge, then still an engineering marvel and the world’s longest suspension bridge. It was appropriate that it connected Brooklyn with Manhattan because it was in the latter area that much of Dorothy’s young adulthood was spent and where she first began the work that would mark her most important legacy. Her parents were John and Grace Day. He was tall, as was Dorothy in adulthood, and was born in Cleveland, Tennessee of Scotch-Irish blood. His work was primarily as a sports writer, and his passion was horse racing. He liked his alcohol and claimed to be an atheist, and Dorothy was never close to him. She was much closer to her mother, who was of English descent and came from upstate New York.
Dorothy was the third child of the couple in less than three years, being preceded by her brothers Donald and Sam, both of whom, like their father, became journalists. Two years after Dorothy’s birth, the couple had another child, Della, with whom Dorothy shared a close sisterly bond throughout their lives. More than a decade later, after some miscarriages, the final Day child, John, was born. By that time, 1912, the Day family was living in Chicago.
Previous to the Chicago move, the family had spent two years in and around Oakland California. But then the earthquake of April 1906, which destroyed much of San Francisco, caused enough damage in Oakland to provoke Dorothy’s father to seek employment elsewhere. For many months after moving to Chicago he was unable to find a job, and he often sat in the living room of their drab tenement apartment writing—mainly a novel (never published and perhaps never even completed), but also some shorter pieces that earned the family a little money.In Dorothy’s autobiographical From Union Square to Rome(1938) she described their tenement: “[It] stretched away down the block and there were back porches and paved courtyards with never a touch of green anywhere.”[7]
This unemployed period brought the Day family its greatest hardship and poverty, but Dorothy’s mother’s resourcefulness and good spirits mitigated the adversity of the family’s condition. She later lovingly described her mother.
My mother had great natural virtues and a delightful temperament that helped her through much hardship and uncertainty. She refused to worry when things were going badly, or when the family had its periods of poverty. There were days when she had to do the family washing, the sheets, blankets, and all, and after a day in the basement laundry, she used to bathe and dress as though she were going out to a dinner party.
She reigned over the supper table as a queen, powdered, perfumed, daintily clothed, all for the benefit of us children. She is still a woman who loves people and uses her charm to please them. She loves life and all the gayeties and frivolities of life; but when through poverty she was deprived of “good times” she made them for herself and got enjoyment from little things. When she felt low she used to go downtown and squander a little money, shopping for a bargain in a hat or a new blouse, never forgetting to bring home some little gift for us all.[8]
Sometime after Dorothy’s tenth birthday in November 1907, her father obtained a position as the sports editor of a minor Chicago paper, and soon afterwards the family moved to better housing. By the time her brother John was born in 1912 they had moved a few more times and were now living in a large house, which even contained a library, near Lincoln Park. Dorothy later recalled the house fondly. During the two years after baby John’s birth, however, she often had to care for her new brother, including in the early morning hours before she left for school. Before John’s birth she had already been helping out in other ways around the house like washing dishes.She relates in a second autobiographical work, The Long Loneliness,that such chores helped develop in her an appreciation for the value of work well done.
Her favorite pastime was reading. She later recalled that she had been reading since age four, including children's stories, The Arabian Nights, and parts of a Bible she discovered in an attic while living in California. When she was twelve and in Chicago her two favorite writers were Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes) and Rider Haggard (author of King Solomon's Mines and other novels of adventure). Her enthusiasm for Sherlock Holmes began a life-long fondness for detective stories. Although her father would not allow “trash” reading in their Chicago house with a library, she occasionally snuck in romances and hid an illustrated copy of Swinburn’s erotic long poem “Tristram of Lyonesse.” But she mainly read the books her father possessed such as those of Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe. In one of her final columns for The Catholic Worker, the paper she edited for almost a half century, she wrote: “All of us were constant readers in our home, and I, myself, liked those books best which were written in the first person, like David Copperfield, and the reader was closely identified with the joys and sufferings of hero and heroine.”[9] Besides Dickens’ David Copperfield she also read his Bleak House and Little Dorritt, and she was moved by Jean Valjean’sheroic fight against injustice in Hugo's Les Miserables. Other major writers that she read while in high school included Dostoevsky and Ibsen.
In From Union Square to Romeshe wrote that about then Thomas “DeQuincey [1785-1859] was my favorite author, and I read everything he wrote that I could get from the library. [Herbert] Spencer was another writer that I tried hard to read. I wanted to read him because I came across references to his work in Jack London's books. Of course I read everything of Jack London's and Upton Sinclair's, and they had much influence on my way of thinking. With it all I still read [John] Wesley, the New Testament and The Imitation of Christ and received great comfort from them.”[10] Among London’s works that especially influenced her were his essays on class conflict and his novels, especially Marin Eden, which depicted its hero’s struggle to escape poverty, educate himself, and find meaning, love, and beauty. Sinclair’s The Jungle was set in Chicago, and Dorothy visited some of the streets where she imagined his characters might have interacted. She later recalled that like London and Sinclair, she wanted to write books that would convince people of the injustices that existed and contribute toward creating a more just order.About thepoor people she came across in these works, she wrote that “from that time on my life was to be linked to theirs, their interests would be mine: I had received a call, a vocation, a direction in life.”She also sympathized with Russian revolutionaries like Peter Kropotkin and Vera Figner, two of many such people who opposed tsarist rule in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her senior year in high school she wrote a story of such revolutionaries and “the martyrdom of one of them.”[11]
At this time her brother Donald was working on the The Day Book, a minor Chicago paper, where Carl Sandburg, the “poet of the people” inspired him“to look on the people as he did, with love and hope of great accomplishment.” Like Sandburg in this period, she was sympathetic with U.S. socialism and greatly admired socialist leader Eugene Debs, whom she considered “a great and noble labor leader of inspired utterance.”[12] Although familiar withthe poetry of Swinburne and Sandburg,and translating some Vergil in her Latin class, as well as quoting Tennyson in a letter to a friend, Dorothy’s enthusiasm for poetry does not seem to have been as great as that for prose. Nevertheless, she overstated the case when she recalled that in the mid 1920s, upon meeting the poet Hart Crane,she “knew nothing about poetry.”[13]
As she later looked back at her childhood, she was grateful that there were as of yet so few distractions from reading—like radiosthat would blare “the news of the world . . . into the home a dozen times a day.” She did remember going to movies on Sunday afternoons, seeing mainly inoffensive “Wild West stories and mystery tales.”[14]
Although her father proclaimed atheism and her mother, although raised Episcopalian, did not go to church either, Dorothy later remembered that as a young girl she had had various religious experiences. After discovering the Bible when still young in California, she later recalled being tremendously excited about her encounter with God. “It was as though life were fuller, richer, more exciting in every way. Here was someone that I had never really known about before and yet felt to be One whom I would never forget, that I would never get away from. The game might grow stale, it might assume new meanings, new aspects, but life would never again be the same. I had made a great discovery.” Also in California there was a little playmate her own age, Naomi, whose family were Methodists, and Dorothy started going to church and Sunday school with them. Dorothy loved the hymn singing at church and also those sung by Naomi’s family at home before they went to sleep for the night. Despite the earlier death of the children’s father, Dorothy thought that the widowed family possessed something her family lacked: “a belief, a faith, and the consequent order and tranquillity that went with that belief.”[15]
After moving to Chicago, Dorothy met her first Catholic. As she later remembered it, she burst in one morning to a friend’s apartment and discovered the little girl’s mother praying on her knees. She told Dorothy that the children had gone to the store and then she continued praying. Dorothy remembered the moment as “a glimpse of supernatural beauty” and as her “first impulse towards Catholicism.” She “felt a warm burst of love” toward the mother, “a feeling of gratitude and happiness” that continued to warm her heart whenever she remembered her. “She had God, and there was beauty and joy in her life.”[16] Dorothy also met another girl, Mary Harrington, who told her about Mary, the mother of Jesus, and “a heaven peopled with saints, and this also was a great comfort.” Once after her friend Mary told her about some saint, Dorothy remembered “the feeling of lofty enthusiasm I had, how my heart seemed almost bursting with desire to take part in such high endeavor. . . . This was one of those occasions when my small heart was enlarged. I could feel it swelling with love and gratitude to such a good God for such a friendship as Mary's, for conversation such as hers, and I was filled with lofty ambitions to be a saint, a natural striving, a thrilling recognition of the possibilities of spiritual adventure.”[17]
Like the saints, Dorothy wrote, “I, too, wanted to do penance for my own sins and for the sins of the whole world, for I had a keen sense of sin, of natural imperfection and earthliness. I often felt clearly that I was being deliberately evil in my attitudes, just as I clearly recognized truth when I came across it. And the thrill of joy that again and again stirred my heart when I came across spiritual truth and beauty never abated, never left me as I grew older.”[18]
When Dorothy was twelve, an Episcopalian minister came to the Day house and persuaded Dorothy’s mother to send her to a religious class, preparing her for baptism and confirmation. She recalled “being much embarrassed at being baptized, tall, gawky girl” that she was. What she loved most about the Episcopalian services was the singing: When “the choir sang the TeDeum or the Benedicite my heart melted within me. They expressed pure truth and beauty to me, and for a year or so I never missed Sunday service.”
Not long afterwards, however, she stopped going to services. Her mother had become interested in Christian Science, and Dorothy thought it was as convincing as the Episcopalian approach. More importantly, the reading of London and Sinclair led her to distrust all churches, though not abandon her belief in God or to cease reading the Christian New Testament.
Quotations from a letter she had written while a senior in high school give insight into her religious feelings by then. “Every day belongs to God and every day we are to serve Him, doing His pleasure.” She loved nearby Lincoln Park in the winter: “So solitary and awful in the truest meaning of the word. God is there. Of course, He is everywhere but under the trees and looking over the wide expanse of lake He communicates himself to me and fills me with a deep quiet peace.”But at other times the letter indicates that she felt sinful, partly because of romantic longings. “It is wrong to think so much about human love. All those feelings and cravings that come to us are sexual desires. We are prone to have them at this age, I suppose, but I think they are impure. It is sensual and God is spiritual. We must harden ourselves to these feelings, for God is love and God is all, so the only love is of God and is spiritual without taint of earthliness. I am afraid I have never really experienced this love or I would never crave the sensual love or the thrill that comes with the meeting of lips.” She also stated, “Poor weak creatures we are, yet God is our Father and God is love, ever-present, ready to enfold us and comfort us and hold us up,” and “I know it seems foolish to try to be so Christ-like—but God says we can—why else His command, ‘Be ye therefore perfect.’”[19]
Although Dorothy had a few schoolgirl crushes, there was very little romance in her life before she went away to the University of Illinois at Urbana, which she did in September 1914. It was only a month after Europe had plunged itself into what became known as the Great War (WWI), but she was only sixteen at the time, her seventeenth birthday not occurring until November. Still, despite her young age, she had won a scholarship.